The luckiest of visitors enjoyed an audience with Simpson himself, often while he was steering an old road sign through a band saw or cutting whimsical animal shapes out of sheet metal. The artist—a term he scoffed at—would let you rummage through his barn studio full of smaller-scale windmills for purchase.
Over the last several years, the large whirligigs on his property have been painstakingly dismantled for refurbishment. They'll be installed at the Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park in downtown Wilson, N.C., slated to open in November.
An intuitive engineer, Simpson made his first windmill while stationed on Saipan during World War II. The makeshift contraption powered his Air Force unit's washing machine. After returning home to Lucama, he made a living moving houses and repairing engines. Simpson didn't begin making whirligigs until his mid-60s.
He gained recognition as "outsider art," also called visionary art or folk art, captured the attention of collectors and curators. Simpson's name fits with famous self-taught figures like Henry Darger, Adolf Wölfli and Howard Finster. He was ambivalent about, if not amused by, his fame.
The North Carolina House passed a measure last month naming the whirligig as the state's official folk art.